"To say that Kwan promotes a queer sensibility in his understanding of Chinese cultural and cinematic traditions does not entail arguing that these traditions are originally unqueer, or that their queerness is more or less Kwan’s invention. It does, however, rehearse the Foucauldian conception of gender and sexuality as shaped by discourse, or, in Sang Tze-lan’s words, as subject to new and shifting frameworks of signification and perception. This resignification of preexisting crossgender and same-sex phenomena is discernible but simultaneously obliterated in the English subtitles to Kwan’s narration. On the one hand, the Chinese phrases that predominate Kwan’s discussion of sexuality – such as tongxing qingyu (same-sex desire or homoeroticism), xingbie daocuo (gender confusion or gender inversion) or bianxing (literally sex change or transsexual) – make it relatively easy for the translator, since they have an origin in the language of Euro-American sexual discourse and have been circulated in Chinese communities, sometimes even gaining in popularity through GLBTQ (gay-lesbian-bi-trans-queer) movements. Yet when Kwan employs argot specific to the cross-gender performance in Chinese cultural practices, the subtitles inevitably decontextualize the practices and render the argot as isomorphic with queer terms, partly because of the imperative to immediately provide an approximate English equivalent. In both Kwan’s narration and the English subtitles, phrases that entail a historicized understanding of Chinese literary and theatrical traditions, such as yizhuang (literally, ‘changing apparel’) and fanchuan (reverse role-play), are then resignified as (and reduced to) transvestitism and drag. In highlighting the link between postmodern polysexual sensibility and traditional cultural forms of sexual organization, Kwan encodes these forms as queerly transgressive. And in laying bare and reinterpreting as queer the elements that seem to have been closeted in Chinese-language cinemas, Yang+ Yin, to borrow Berry’s insight, blurs not only the past–present distinction underlying the construction of Chinese modern nations but also the East–West boundary constitutive of neo-Confucian, East Asian modernity. As a cine-genealogy showcasing both national cinema and Chinese queerness, Yang+ Yin certainly realizes the political imperative advocated by international queer studies to pluralize a national or cultural identity with queer subjects and to reverse the hegemonic containment of sexual minorities. Kwan’s emphasis on alternative genders and sexualities in Chinese-language cinemas is especially meaningful in this singular ‘Chinese’ context.
However, if we shift our critical gaze to a transnational framework, the film immediately evokes a more dubious cultural politics. For example, Kwan’s compilation of cinematic texts originating from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China is itself a transnational act under the pretext of historical, cultural and social homogeneity. The film overlooks the fluctuating political animosity or sympathy between these communities and the distinct historical trajectories that have marked the consciousness of each populace, as most textual elements operate on the dubious premisses of Hong Kong’s, Taiwan’s and China’s shared cultural heritage and sociological proximity. ‘Crossdressing’, Kwan says in the last chapter, ‘is a formative element of our culture’ (emphasis added). Putting aside his mother tongue (Cantonese) and delivering his narration in Mandarin (the official language of China, Taiwan and post-1997 Hong Kong), Kwan glides over the geopolitical disparities demarcated by the three countries’ films to address a pan-Chinese consciousness. (The chapter ‘Fathers are Everywhere’, for example, moves in a swift and haphazard way between the works and interviews of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Chen Kaige, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang and Allen Fong). In short, the queerness reconstituted by Kwan as Chinese is pan-Chinese or trans-Chinese, which underpins the resurgent geopolitics of ‘Greater China’ or ‘Cultural China’, terms that refer to the economically or culturally integrated zone consisting of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. With all its queerness, Yang+ Yin feeds into another discourse of collective identity and perpetuates the myth of Chinese culturalism."
from Queering Chinese-language cinemas: Stanley Kwan’s Yang+ Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema by CHIA-CHI WU , Screen 51:1 Spring 2010
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